What is a CRM?

CRMs are a tool which every salesperson should want, and really need, to be efficient. I have long been a proponent. They helped me generate a company sales record that stood for over a decade and to win a number of consecutive power station water systems totaling over $16 million in a single year. I have never considered myself a great salesperson, just more organized than my competition. How a complex sale can be won without one is incomprehensible to me.

I‘ve been using a computerized customer databases to my advantage for close to three decades. During many of those years, a Franklin Planner was my trusty sidekick, along with numerous devices, now considered antiquated. A few people may remember Palm Pilots. I had one of the first business card scanners with OCR, which left a lot to be desired. There was a lot of miscellaneous tech that didn’t work well together, trying to help me keep my customers organized.

My father was in sales. He had a Rolodex, and my mother kept index cards for him with extra information. They would pull cards out on the way to dinners, reminding them of customer’s wives and kids names, etc. It was from them I learned the importance of tracking customer information. My first real database (beyond a LOTUS 123 spreadsheet - who remembers it?) was Symantec’s ACT. It was nothing more than a Microsoft Access Database with a Visual Basic wrapper. The interface and database were easily customized and served me well.

The acronym CRM ( Customer Relationship Manager) came along about the time Saleslogix bought ACT. I helped implement that package at my then employer, along with providing over 40,000 of the first 50,000+ contacts. Following Saleslogix, the next generation of software was Salesforce. I have helped (or attempted to help) two large scale implementations. The largest issues have been data management and adoption by the salespeople.

There are some very specific strategies helping ensure an expensive batch of software licenses doesn’t go to waste. I will discuss my thoughts in the next blog post.